125 Amazing Facts about Space, Planets and Universe

• 1. Saturn's moon Titan has plenty of evidence of organic (life) chemicals in its atmosphere.
• 2. Life is known to exist only on Earth, but in 1986 NASA found what they thought might be fossils of microscopic living things in a rock from Mars.
• 3. Most scientists say life's basic chemicals formed on the Earth. The astronomer Fred Hoyle said they came from space.
• 4. Oxygen is circulated around the helmet in space suits in order to prevent the visor from misting.
• 5. The middle layers of space suits are blown up like a balloon to press against the astronaut's body. Without this pressure, the astronaut's body would boil!
• 6. The gloves included in the space suit have silicon rubber fingertips which allow the astronaut some sense of touch.
• 7. The full cost of a spacesuit is about $11 million although 70% of this is for the backpack and the control module.
• 8. Ever wondered how the pull of gravity is calculated between heavenly bodies? It's simple. Just multiply their masses together, and then divide the total by the square of the distance between them.
• 9. Glowing nebulae are named so because they give off a dim, red light, as the hydrogen gas in them is heated by radiation from the nearby stars.
• 10. The Drake Equation was proposed by astronomer Frank Drake to work out how many civilizations there could be in our galaxy - and the figure is in millions.